Tomos wrote:

In Japanese wikipedia, the whole article gets deleted

when some infringement is found (or when highly suspected case is not cleared after some period). Upon deleting a page, non-infringing text exist in the past or current versions will be recycled - but the revision history is gone. I don't know if this practice will sustain if, say, someone does an infringing pasting to an article with 100 revisions, though.

OK so instead of theoretically breaking the law by allowing infringing material in the article history you are definitely breaking the law by destroying attributions to the people who wrote the non-infringing part of the article? The GNU FDL /requires/ author attribution and the way we do that is through the article history. Please don't delete the history of an article that still has valid, non-infringing text just because somebody at one time added illegal text; having infringing text is a lessor evil than destroying valid author credit. If and when a copyright holder complains a developer can delete the particular revision. No need to be too paranoid about this. :)

If adding a new function for deleting just a past version of an article is fairy easy, I personally would like it to happen.

It sounds like it would be and I will be all for it. However, there are more important things to do first with the deletion management system to make it scalable. And each revision deletion will have to be easily undeletable by another Admin. Basic undeletion (like we already have for entire article histories) is, IMO, absolutely needed before regular Admins have this ability. I have nothing against the developers first making an easy to use user interface for them to delete revisions though - and they always should have the ability to permanently delete things (in cases of slander and libel, for example).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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